In Stay Top of Mind When You Can't Meet With Clients Part 1, we outline the importance of creating meaningful content and the topics that are guaranteed to drive traffic to your website. In Part 2, we’ll focus on maintaining your website and give tips on how to optimize your digital presence in order to stand out in the aerospace and defense industry.

Your Website Is a Must-Have Sales and Marketing Tool.

70% of consumers have already made their purchasing decision before they even contact a company - so to be in the running you need a web presence. If your website is built correctly benefits can include bringing in leads, qualifying them through content, and submitting sales requests; answering the ‘why’ behind your marketing strategy; and around-the-clock availability (consumer convenience and access to info).

Nine Tips to Optimize Your Online Presence:

1. Does your website have a purpose?

One of the first questions we ask our clients during a website project is, “What is the purpose of your website? What do you want it to achieve for your company?” Brand Awareness/Education? Lead Generation? Sales (E-Commerce)? If you don’t know why you have a website it may be hard to determine if it is providing any ROI.

2. Is your website easy to navigate?

Make sure the navigation is simple and clear. We also recommend having no more than five categories in your top navigation - anymore can start to feel overwhelming and cluttered.

3. Does each page have a purpose?

Just as your website should have a purpose, so should each page on that website. After determining your website’s purpose, optimize each and every page to lead visitors down the path you want them to take - complete with action items.

4. Is your copy optimized for the web?

When it comes to website copy, you need to craft a clear purposeful story and each page must have a single purpose that is supported by the web copy. Analyze and optimize your SEO - what terms are you showing up for? Think about what people are searching for and use those items as blog post topics. You want to provide a ton of information for your users but you also need to be careful of information overload (users will leave if they are overwhelmed). Help people find you.

5. Are there clear calls to action?

Are people able to contact you through your website or forms? If you want to make a sale, make it easy to connect.

6. Are you using your website analytics?

Your website is a gold mine of information that can help you build business, expand your audience, and drive higher sales. Here are just a few of the important things you can learn from your website:

1. 1. Overall Website Performance. High visitor numbers tell you people are interested in your content, products, and services.
   2. Audience Information. This intelligence tells you where your website visitors are located and what pages on your site were of most interest. This information is exceptionally valuable in guiding your marketing strategy.
   3. Website SEO and Authority. Here you learn what organic keywords your website is ranking for and which ones generate the most traffic to your site.
   4. Website Performance & Marketing Correlation. Urchin Tracking Module, or UTM, codes are an easy and simple way to help you gauge your marketing campaigns.

7. Is your website up to date?

Your website is a living marketing tool. To be successful, it must remain updated and current both on the front and back end. Google is constantly crawling websites to deliver search results. If you are not updating, Google may view it as old content and could lower your website’s rank on search queries. Speaking of search engines…

8. How is your website’s SEO?

While there’s a technical aspect to SEO, here are some simple steps you can take to improve your SEO now:

• • Review your website. Are there any products or services missing or things you no longer offer? Is there any critical information that isn’t reflected?
  • Does each webpage serve a specific purpose and does the content and keywords reflect that purpose clearly?
  • Does each page have at least 300 quality words per page that create unique, useful, informative, credible, and engaging copy?
  • Who are your customers and what would they search? Make a list of potential search queries. These are your keywords and key phrases to put in your copy.
  • Pro Tip: Work with your sales team and account managers to develop a list of the questions your prospects and customers ask. Or work with Aerospace Marketing Lab. We can manage all of the above, plus complete additional keyword research to help identify what keywords your website is currently ranking for, what your competitors are ranking for, and reveal search volume for specific keywords to confirm if effort should be invested in specific terms.

9. Does your website design match your brand?

Take a step back and ask yourself, “Does my website attract the correct audience?” Compare your website design to your other marketing tactics - does it all flow together and tell the same high-level story? Does your brand reflect who you want to be and who you want to be perceived as?

Stay tuned for Stay Top of Mind When You Can't Meet With Clients Part 3 where we dive deeper into maintaining your touch-points with your audience and potential consumers. If you want to see it straight in your inbox, subscribe here.